Modern organizations find it desirable to apply policies for information protection across the lifecycle of that information. For example, in the context of information protection as part of an e-mail, the lifecycle includes from creation/authoring, to transport and deliver, to consumption. Throughout the lifecycle of the information, organizations need to be able to take a single policy, and apply it consistently across the set of policy enforcement points applicable to the information. For e-mail, the policy enforcement points may include the e-mail client application at time of e-mail authoring, e-mail servers applying the policy in transit, may storage and delivery systems and e-mail clients during the e-mail consumption.
Typically, an organization would have to author separate policies for the various policy enforcement points like parameter and internal mail servers, Mailbox storage systems, and E-mail clients like Microsoft Outlook® software in order to achieve these goals.